Steve Forbes: GOP's 'Defund Obamacare' Strategy Doesn't Work

As budget and debt ceiling negotiations continue into early next year, Republicans should focus on positives, says publisher and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes.

The "defund Obamacare" strategy didn't work, Forbes said Thursday on Fox News Channel, because the public doesn't understand it.

"People don't know what it means, and it sounds almost like a disease," Forbes told guest host Stuart Varney on Fox's "Your World." "Go with things like: 'The American people should be treated like big business in this healthcare bill.'"

Republicans agreed to a mostly clean continuing resolution Wednesday night just ahead of a midnight deadline for raising the debt ceiling. The deal reopened the government until January 15 and raised the debt ceiling until February 7.

Forbes didn't like what he perceived as gloating from President Barack Obama in a Thursday morning televised White House speech in which he said that if Republicans didn't like his policies they should "win an election."

"He can't help himself," Forbes said. Obama loves to rub his opponents' faces in the dirt when he wins, Forbes added.

"That's fine in a football game, doing a spike, but when you are president of the United States trying to get something done … this is not the way you go about it," he said. Obama, instead, should let his opponents save face so they'll want to work with him in the future, Forbes told Varney.

But Obama wants only to set up Democratic wins in the 2014 congressional election, Forbes said. "That means conflict and hoping to put the Republicans back on their backs again as he did yesterday."

Obama is doing all he can to win congressional elections next year so he can "ram through the rest of his agenda" in the last two years of his presidency, Forbes said.